The following sections describe the details of the select
list, the table expression, and the sort specification.
WITH queries are treated last since they
are an advanced feature.

A simple kind of query has the form:

SELECT * FROM table1;

Assuming that there is a table called table1, this command would retrieve all rows and
all user-defined columns from table1.
(The method of retrieval depends on the client application. For
example, the psql program will
display an ASCII-art table on the screen, while client libraries
will offer functions to extract individual values from the query
result.) The select list specification *
means all columns that the table expression happens to provide. A
select list can also select a subset of the available columns or
make calculations using the columns. For example, if table1 has columns named a, b, and c (and perhaps others) you can make the following
query:

SELECT a, b + c FROM table1;

(assuming that b and c are of a numerical data type). See Section 7.3 for more details.

FROM table1 is a simple kind of table
expression: it reads just one table. In general, table
expressions can be complex constructs of base tables, joins, and
subqueries. But you can also omit the table expression entirely
and use the SELECT command as a
calculator:

SELECT 3 * 4;

This is more useful if the expressions in the select list
return varying results. For example, you could call a function
this way:

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